On Monday, after Harvard University publicly rejected a series of authoritarian demands Trump administration officials sent to Harvard the previous Friday, one of those officials tried out a novel de-escalation technique: He frantically called the university up and insisted the letter had been sent by mistake.
That original letter, sent April 11, ordered Harvard to comply with numerous outlandish demands, among them discontinuing diversity efforts, limiting or outright banning student protests, installing right-wing faculty essentially hand-picked by the administration and spying on international students.
Harvard President Alan Garber condemned these demands in a statement released the morning of April 14, saying in part, “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue. The University…
